Sally Alder is a couple of ears past her wild youth as the hard-drinking, guitar playing, hell-raising singer known as Mustang Sally. But then she's grown with age, She's wiser and more coolheaded now, and, more important, Sally has learned how to keep a secret. It's a good thing, too, because she's going to need every advantage she's gained in order to handle the job she's just taken.
Imagine having to move from LA to Laramie to get a thrill.
A professor of history at UCLA, Sally has just been offered the hugely endowed and deliciously secretive Dunwoodie Distinguished Chair in American Women's History at the University of Wyoming. Job description: Move into the late Meg Dunwoodie's posh residence in Laramie (the only one of its kind) and, with sole proprietors of her papers, construct the definitive Meg Dunwoodie biography--without telling anyone anything about it.
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Sally has been hired, in part, to write the biography of Margaret Dunwoodie, a well-known frontier poet whose work is troubling, seductive, and hilarious (Sally's favorite poem is "Still Life of Fascists with Herefords"). As Sally makes her way slowly through a lifetime's worth of papers, poems, letters, and shopping lists, she finds her attention drifting more toward the present than the past; how to reposition herself in Laramie society, how to negotiate a newly explosive courtship with former lover Hawk Green--these seem far more pressing than Dunwoodie's story. Brown-Eyed Girl is no fast-paced thriller; Swift is content to let her story drift as peacefully as spring snow moving across the plains.
For that reason, the brusque demands of plot, action, and mystery seem to strike a foreign chord upon their introduction. When a distant relative of the poet, disgruntled at having been denied what he considers his rightful inheritance, joins forces with reactionary millionaire Teton County rancher Elroy Foote to menace Sally and steal a fortune they are convinced is hidden among the papers, the novel teeters precariously on the verge of trying to become something it isn't. But Swift wisely retreats from overinvesting in a plot that is, it must be said, too weak to support itself. She chooses instead to treat Foote and his henchmen with a sly sense of the absurd: "Most of the Unknown Soldiers were intellectually challenged good ol' boys and mentally rearranged Vietnam vets who thought for various reasons (too many wilderness areas, too many missile silos, the advent of bad cappuccino at the local Diamond Shamrock) that foreigners and the federal government were engaged in a secret plot to take over Wyoming."
Though the capital-M Mystery aspect of Brown-Eyed Girl is perhaps more a distraction than an attraction, the little mysteries of the human personality--the foibles of friends, lovers, and enemies--more than make up for its intrusion. Swift's talent for person and place will easily woo you away from plot. --Kelly Flynn
Virginia Swift teaches history at the University of New Mexico. She also writes nonfiction under the name of Virginia Scharff. She lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
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